


Glamorie

by Kimi_Ichisaigosuki



Series: Cold Iron and Old Blood [3]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Blood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 14:02:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11625075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kimi_Ichisaigosuki/pseuds/Kimi_Ichisaigosuki
Summary: Change has many unforseen repercussions, and one of those is an inhuman appearance in a world controlled by human witches and wizards.





	Glamorie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Funkspiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Funkspiel/gifts).



> This is for Funkzpiel’s birthday! I’m sorry this is late, I’m in the middle of moving from the Upper Midwest to the West coast via road trip, but since you seem to have been consumed by Fae!Graves, a snippet from the AU I’m working on seemed appropriate. (There’s more than I anticipated, but I’m hoping I can finish the next piece. It’s coming together far more slowly than the previous two…) Either way, I hope you enjoy!

When Percival Graves returned home, the house wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. The man who had left New York for Ireland was not the man who returned, and though he was familiar, he was…different. The blood in his veins ran cold, shielding him from the worst of summer’s heat and keeping him comfortable in the winter. He didn’t look human any more, his Sidhe blood drawn out and made prominent in a way he had tried to hide all his life.

The first night back in New York, he had stripped down and stood in front of the full-length mirror in his bedroom to see what had been fundamentally changed.

His height was the same as it had been before his journey, but everything else was different enough to set him apart from the average human walking down the street. His skin was pale and translucent as moonstone, and his veins seemed to glow with that blue iridescence at the heart of the stone. His hair was dark as night and shot through with silver starfire, his eyes black from lid to lid and filled with swirling galaxies of dark stars. His ears were delicately pointed, and his facial bones seemed to be ever so slightly sharpened. His too-pale lips, seemingly on the verge of frostbite, hid teeth that were white as ivory and too-many-too-sharp, making his curlicued smile that much more unnerving. His fingers were too long, not with too many joints the way Queen Mab’s had been, but unnaturally lengthened at the bone and with nails like chips of clouded quartz. His scars were like marble veins in the moonstone of his skin, opaque in a manner that made the eye skitter away. His physique was had gone from muscular to slender, but he was no less powerful for the change. Whipcord muscle where before he had been bulky, flexibility where there had been brute strength.

Overall, decidedly inhuman.

Returning to work immediately was out of the question until he had a permanent solution to his problematic appearance. He needed to maintain a constant glamorie to appear as he had before Queen Mab had bestowed the gifts of Winter on him, and sometimes that glamorie slipped. Usually, the slip was no big deal. A momentary lapse in concentration, something startling him. But it was a problem, particularly when he discovered that the glamorie didn’t hold up well to physical harm, something he was likely to encounter in his line of work. He discovered this when he was tending to the garden.

He was trimming back one of the blackberry briars threatening to take over the corner of the yard and reached too far to clear away some of the cut branches, catching his finger between the blades of the shears. His skin split, and the next thing he knew his tanned skin was pale as moonlight and the deep gash in his finger was dripping claret blood that sprouted tiny ice crystals when it hit the ground. The edges of the cut on his finger rimed with frost as the wound froze itself shut, and he stared at his hand warily.

The house shifted on its foundations, and he heard the cornerstone groan with the movement. Percival frowned and looked up at his home. It looked darker, like there were shadows coming to roost in the eaves, and the windows looked grimy. He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. Time to reintroduce himself. He had hoped that Queen Mab’s gift wouldn’t make him too unrecognizable to the family estate, but having the Unseelie gifts of Winter itself running through his veins seemed to be too much for a house built on Seelie blood.

Percival tried to make bread, but his blood froze the dough solid. He spent a good ten minutes trying in vain to thaw the dough before he gave up and fed the incomplete attempt to the fire. He tried to make a tincture to pour over the hearth, but the sifting ice crystals drifted down like snow and evaporated before they hit the stone. None of the traditional blood magic worked.

He stared down at his hands, at his too-long fingers and his translucent skin and the blue veins tracing like filigree over his body. Then he slowly looked over at the cabinet that held the family silver.

Two hours later saw him standing in the basement, sweat dripping into his eyes as he used his magic to shape the molten silver in the air. He worked his blood and hair into two hollow silver pendants strengthened with his magic: one to be worn, and one to be embedded in the cornerstone made from the sacred standing stone that formed the gateway to the family homestead. He finished the pendants and looked over the swirling designs reminiscent of briars and oak trees, scattered with droplets of silver that looked like acorns. He plucked them out of the air, paying no mind to the way the raw magic seething through the silver burned his flesh as he laid a hand on the granite of the cornerstone and murmured words to make the stone part under his fingers like clay. He pressed one pendant into the hollow of the stone and watched as the cornerstone flowed around it, slowly accepting the silver into itself and accepting Percival in the process. He felt the house settle around him, finally welcoming him home, and let his shoulders relax as the magic in both pendants settled into icy calm.

He conjured a leather strip and looped it through the bale of the pendant before settling it around his neck, feeling the comfortable chill against his breastbone. His blood had chilled the recently-molten metal to just above freezing, a temperature he would have barely been able to tolerate before the change that had been thrust upon him.

Percival closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let the glamorie of the pendant settle snug around his skin. When he opened his eyes, his skin was tan and his scars were simply white lines. He went upstairs, checked his reflection in the mirror.

Human.

He smiled, and there was no Faerie curl at the corners of his mouth, no impossible arrangement of too-sharp teeth. He went to the study, and sent Seraphina a note.

He would be back at work next Monday.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you thought! Constructive criticism is always welcome.


End file.
